Google Brings Chrome Renderer, Speedy Javascript To IE 239
Posted
by
kdawson
from the behind-enemy-lines dept.
from the behind-enemy-lines dept.
A month after we discussed Google's bringing SVG to IE, several readers let us know that Google is expanding the beachhead by offering Chrome's renderer and speedy Javascript execution in an IE plugin. This effort is in service of allowing IE to participate in Google Wave when that technology's preview is extended in a week's time. The plugin, currently in an early stage of development, is called Google Chrome Frame.
Re:Security? (Score:4, Informative)
From Chrome Frame Developer's Guide [google.com]:
Note: forcing websites into Google Chrome Frame with these techniques may lead to unexpected behavior. Google Chrome Frame will fetch URLs using the host browser's network stack, so the web site will send content intended for the host browser
So it looks they are only replacing the renderer and not the networking and other internal parts of IE, so it will behave remotely as a real IE, only that the content is displayed by the plugin. This is not a new idea, people tried to do it with Gecko, the advantage of WebKit is that the host (in this case IE) can provide a lot, instead Gecko is tightly tied to NetLib (The Mozilla Networking Library), NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime), NSS (Network Security Services) so it was not practical as a plugin because it will be a complete browser inside IE
Re:8 hours a week (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no.
Google Docs is based on two applications: Writely, by Upstartle, and XL2Web, by 2Web Technologies.
Google Earth was originally named Earth Viewer and it was created by Keyhole, inc.
Google Maps was created for the company Where 2 Technologies.
Code and Scholar search, in spite of being useful, are nothing more than variations of Google Search, so from that list only GMail was truly created at Google.
Re:8 hours a week (Score:2, Informative)
Re:8 hours a week (Score:2, Informative)
Don't forget about Orkut!
Re:8 hours a week (Score:2, Informative)
Re:threat to Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Why would Microsoft be pissed? This technology keeps people using their product so people have fewer reasons to migrate to another browser.
If Microsoft's strategy was to cripple IE, why did they implement a modular system that allowed third parties to add their own scripting languages and rendering plug-ins (which they introduced way back in Internet Explorer 3). If they tried to block their documented APIs like Active Scripting to spite Google, then they would be killing off all the other scripting languages that people have written for it: Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, PHP, Rexx and Delphi (and a bunch of lesser known others).
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not a full-time web developer but I used to be contracted by a university for web stuff for a while. From my own experience I can tell you IE's support for CSS 2.1 is so shitty that I had to spend 3x extra time writing eye-burning special hacks that shouldn't have been there in the first place. The "main" CSS file of the site, which strictly adhered to W3C CSS 2.1 standard, works perfectly right out of the box for every fricking browser out there except IE. And I had to maintain a whole bunch of "hacked" (still standard-compliant, just plain ugly) CSS files for different versions of IE because each of them sucks its own way.
I was talking about the current IE version, IE 8. It has the most complete CSS 2.1 support. That's all there is to it. This isn't a blanket claim about IE. It didn't have very good CSS 2.1 support before then.
Re:8 hours a week (Score:4, Informative)
You and the GP appear to be mistaking Google Code Search [google.com] for Google Code [google.com].
Re:Finished standards like SVG? (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't say it supports all finished standards. That would be a bold claim. That's a fair criticism. I am simply saying that IE generally doesn't support not-yet-standardized "standards" features.
you mean like the <marquee> element?
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Its on its way to Linux. Chromium has been stable for a couple of weeks so now here is a dev release of Chrome. Works very well on debian at least.
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel [chromium.org]
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
Does Microsoft have any excuse for their browser being this bad after so many years? It's not like CSS support is a bleeding edge feature, maybe CSS3, but I'm talking about CSS standards that have been around for years. I just want to make web pages and not have to, once more, duplicate my effort in-order to get stuff to work on another M$ browser.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Well my user agent string right now is: (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.212.0 Safari/532.0), which says I'm running the latest Chrome very nicely on my Linux box.
If you are using Ubuntu, I suggest you give this PPA a try: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa [launchpad.net]
It's daily builds of Chromium. I've been running it now for a week, and it has not crashed on me a single time. There is a x86 version, as well as a AMD64 version, and the 64-bit version is now true 64 bit, i.e., it does not depend on 32 bit libs.
It's stable and nearly feature complete. Supports all plugins (including Flash) out of the box, if they are installed on your machine. It imported all my settings and profile from Firefox. I like its original look, but it can now also use native Gtk themes of your system, so that it meshes really well with the rest of your system. It implements the one-process-per-tab architecture, and uses a *lot* less memory than Firefox. In fact, it is astonishingly more responsive and less memory-hungry than FF.
There are a few things left, for example printing doesn't work on it yet. Once they implement printing, I'm sure they will roll out the Beta.
Google is also working on an extension framework, so things as AdBlock will become a reality soon.
Give it a try, it's very impressive.